Did the Internet kill curiosity? Why so many would rather play online games than search for knowledge

Last January, a deceptively simple question appeared on the Internet news and discussion site Reddit: “If someone from the 1950s suddenly appeared…what would be the most difficult thing to explain to them about life today?”

“Elizabeth is still the Queen of England,” one user suggested. “It’s not socially acceptable to drink whiskey and smoke cigarettes at work,” wrote another.

The most popular response, however, was this: “I possess a device, in my pocket, that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man. I use it to look at pictures of cats and get into arguments with strangers.”

The Internet has likely been the most profound, life-changing invention in recent modern times, instantly opening portals to information that would once have only been accessible by way of books or from talking to people or from looking under rocks in the woods. But, somewhat paradoxically, it also has the power to rob us of a quality that is completely unique to humans — deep curiosity, the kind that propels society forward.

“This should be the greatest age of curiosity ever,” said Ian Leslie, the London U.K-based author of Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It, a new book that studies the way curiosity can be cultivated or dried up, and how it has sparked many of the great ideas and innovations upon which Western society has thrived.

But it’s not, he argues — far from it. The Internet has forged a “curiosity gap,” he says, in which those conditioned to be inquisitive plumb the depths of knowledge at their fingertips and are hungry for more, while the population of “incurious” inevitably grows, perpetuated by a self-absorbed society that treats big, complicated questions as puzzles to be solved and not mysteries to be mined. In the age of Big Data, the question ‘Why,’ gets asked less and less, he argues. There are a whole lot of people using their iPhones to play Angry Birds and check Facebook, little else.

‘Unless you’ve grown up acquiring these habits of learning and investigation … then you find it very hard to absorb information from the Internet’

“A lot of people are saying ‘the Internet’s going to solve [the inequality] because all of the information is there for the first time ever,'” he says. “But unless you’ve grown up acquiring these habits of learning and investigation and unless you have this kind of wide ranging background of knowledge already in your head, then you find it very hard to absorb information from the Internet and you’re much more likely to use it as a shortcut to getting some answers without actually going into things in more depth and detail.”

This erosion of curiosity, however, is shaped by factors well beyond online. It is impacted by the widening poverty gap, the overwhelming swaths of information, and even the educational system. Schools that put a heavy emphasis on child-directed inquiry and don’t also give students a bedrock of factual knowledge, are contributing to a diminishing hunger for knowledge too, Mr. Leslie controversially suggests.

True curiosity, he says, requires effort and time — both things that apparently come at a premium these days. A page out of a notebook belonging to famous artist and inventor Leonardo Da Vinci reveals a to-do list of wide-ranging interests, most of which require actually going and speaking to a person, or trying something out to see what might happen.

History has not always been curiosity’s biggest booster. The oldest stories tell of its dangers: Icarus and the sun. Adam and Eve. Back then, the church, Mr. Leslie wrote, saw no benefit in letting the masses ask questions.

It was only at the Renaissance, the time of Leonardo Da Vinci, that curiosity had “become respectable,” and the church’s rule started being questioned with a “growing political, military and economic impetus to investigate,” Mr. Leslie writes. The Protestant Reformation made it OK to question orthodoxies. The Gutenberg printing press launched forth a generation of pamphleteers.

“Curiosity was emancipated in the seventeenth century,” Philip Ball, author of the 2013 book Curiousity: How Science Became Interested in Everything wrote in an email to the National Post. It’s when English philosopher, statesman and scientist Francis Bacon declared “knowledge is power,” and the key to a mighty state. That remains a motivation for scientific innovation and inquiry, he writes.

The rock stars of the Enlightenment — Ben Franklin who once tried to see if oil would flatten waves in the ocean, James Watt whose tinkering led to the invention of the steam ship engine, Erasmus Darwin whose close study of plants led to the botanical identifications still used today — “made curiosity cool.”

But despite our wealth of information today, “we may be becoming a less curious society than eighteenth-century London,” Mr. Leslie writes. “Curiosity is about the demand as well as the supply of information. It’s about what we want, how we feel about it, and how much effort and time we are prepared to invest in it.”

We are in a “lull” when it comes to true, world-changing innovations, he argues, and that may in part be thanks to a drop-off in deep inquiry.

In his influential 2011 pamphlet, George Mason University economist Tyler Cowan says our 21st century world is at a point of “Great Stagnation.” The American economy, he argues, has reached a “historical technological plateau,” and that extends to much of the Western world.

“He would say ‘Look, there hasn’t been anything as world-changing yet as the car, or indeed the washing machine,” Mr. Leslie said of the economist’s position. “The washing machine changed millions of billions of lives because it saved so much time, particularly for women. It [was] certainly one of the causes of a massive social revolution.” Not even the Internet — at least not yet. That’s not to say there haven’t been highly curious innovators in recent decades — the late Apple founder Steve Jobs is one.

The stagnation theory has been analyzed alongside “The Great Divergence,” a term coined by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman to describe the period of widening social inequality that began in the 1970s and extends to now — the same gap to which Mr. Leslie refers.

But that gap can be closed if curiosity is treated like the muscle it is, the author says.

“The Internet can be a superb instrument of curiosity,” he writes. It just has to be used the right way. Teachers, he says, can — schools in the United States are already trying to do this with its Common Core curriculum. Politicians and policymakers can also start asking ‘why’ a little more often. And the average person can take on a personal mission to find the interesting in the everyday.

Mr. Leslie’s book ends with mention of a poignant blog post by American comic book author Matt Fraction. He was responding to a fan who asked if it is possible for a person to be genuinely disinterested in the world to the point of no longer wanting to live.

He opened up for the very first time about his own suicide attempt in high school. He got into a hot bath and had a razor blade ready. Then a thought sprung into his head that proved pivotal.

“I wondered, then — well, is there anything you’re curious about. Anything you want to see play out. And I thought of a comic I was reading and I’d not figured out the end of the storyline. And I realized I had curiosity. And that was the hook I’d hang my hat on. It…kept me around a little longer.”

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